Secret donors makes Thomas's wife's group a tea party player

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As founder and president of a think tank and advocacy group called Liberty Central, Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas has quickly established herself in the tea party movement.
AP Photo

The Thomases last faced conflict questions in 2000 when Ginni Thomas, then working for the conservative Heritage Foundation, solicited resumes for potential transition team members for George W. Bush, while Justice Thomas was part of the court majority that sided with Bush over Democratic rival Al Gore in the historic case of Bush v. Gore.

While she brushed off those questions as well the ones about Liberty Central, it is clear that her famous husband has helped distinguish the group from the crowd of organizations jockeying for prominence in the new conservative order.

“Her association with Justice Thomas clearly provides a level of credibility that others wouldn’t be able to have, just because of the beliefs that he has and the stands that he has on the different positions that align with our own,” said Carl Graham, president of the Montana Policy Institute, one of the more than 30 state and national think tanks and advocacy groups listed as partners in Liberty Central’s fledgling network.

Before affiliating with Liberty Central, Graham said his group “looked at their mission and we looked at the people involved and we looked at how they are going to try to appeal to people, and it’s similar to what we do.” But, he added, the connection to Justice Thomas “gets you to open the e-mail, if nothing else, as opposed to some other one that you may not even open.”

Liberty Central spent $27,000 last year developing its website, according to its IRS report, and officially launched in May touting partnerships with a slew of prominent establishment groups and the backing of big-name conservatives including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo, who serves on Liberty Central’s board and who Justice Thomas has called “my good friend.”

As the group prepares to ramp up its profile even more in the coming weeks, it has relied on the services of CRC Public Relations, a top conservative Beltway communications shop, and CMDI, a leading political data firm that has reaped at least $15 million in the past decade from clients including the top national Republican Party committees and the presidential campaigns or political committees of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain, among others.

“Ginni was able to raise the seed capital to have a real launch” because of her connections in small-government conservative circles, said Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, a small-government non-profit that pre-dates the year-old tea party movement, but has positioned itself as perhaps the leading national tea party group and has partnered with Liberty Central.

“In my experience working with her, people usually didn’t know (she was married to Clarence Thomas), because she doesn’t wear it on her sleeve,” said Kibbe, who worked with Thomas at the right-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce while her husband was a federal appeals court judge rumored to be on then-President George H.W. Bush’s shortlist for the Supreme Court.

Well, this should be interesting to watch. The media outlets, on both the left and right, now have a new frenzy to whip up with their respective followings. I personally see Thomas as a camp follower of Justice Scalia, with no mind of his own, but having said that, his wife's activities should cause no great outcry, since ethics in Washington D.C. is a foreign concept, anyway.

In an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show – arranged after she and her husband ran into Hannity at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding last month in Palm Beach, Fla. (Justice Thomas performed Limbaugh’s previous wedding, in 1994, at the couple’s Northern Virginia home)

I'm sure you will agree that the First lady should stay out of politics as well.....

Michelle Obama's promoting an end to childhood obesity and her promoting the supporting of military families is NOTHING like Ginni Thomas bashing Obama and the Obama administration. President Obama does NOT sit on the Supreme Court. President Obama does not have to JUDGE cases like the justices on the SCOTUS do.

Justice Thomas can NOT remain unswayed on cases when his wife is raking money in from corporations/individuals.

Michelle Obama's promoting an end to childhood obesity and her promoting the supporting of military families is NOTHING like Ginni Thomas bashing Obama and the Obama administration. President Obama does NOT sit on the Supreme Court. President Obama does not have to JUDGE cases like the justices on the SCOTUS do

But Michelle has spoken at political get-togathers,,,,

I thought this was a free speech country, guess you Liberals are going to work like mad to fix that...

The two donations are the only sources of money the group, which she established in November, reported to the Internal Revenue Service in 2009, according to a recently released report, which blocks out the donors’ names,

My guess, Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Koch Family of WingNUTS supporter of Freedom Works and the astroturf "Tea Party" and other groups looking to bring down OUR representative democratic goverenment at any cost.

That the Koch Family may have bought their way into the bedroom of the SCOTUS is disgusting.